Going Beyond the Reference GTX 970

Zotac has been an interesting company to watch for the past few years. It is a company that has made a name for themselves in the small form factor community with some really interesting designs and products. They continue down that path, but they have increasingly focused on high quality graphics cards that address a pretty wide market. They provide unique products from the $40 level up through the latest GTX 980 Ti with hybrid water and air cooling for $770. The company used to focus on reference designs, but some years past they widened their appeal by applying their own design decisions to the latest NVIDIA products.

Catchy looking boxes for people who mostly order online! Still, nice design.

The beginning of this year saw Zotac introduce their latest “Core” brand products that aim to provide high end features to more modestly priced parts. The Core series makes some compromises to hit price points that are more desirable for a larger swath of consumers. The cards often rely on more reference style PCBs with good quality components and advanced cooling solutions. This equation has been used before, but Zotac is treading some new ground by offering very highly clocked cards right out of the box.

Overall Zotac has a very positive reputation in the industry for quality and support.

Plenty of padding in the box to protect your latest investment.

Zotac GTX 970 AMP! Extreme Core Edition

The product we are looking at today is the somewhat long-named AMP! Extreme Core Edition. This is based on the NVIDIA GTX 970 chip which features 56 ROPS, 1.75 MB of L2 cache, and 1664 CUDA Cores. The GTX 970 has of course been scrutinized heavily due to the unique nature of its memory subsystem. While it does physically have a 256 bit bus, the last 512 MB (out of 4GB) is addressed by a significantly slower unit due to shared memory controller capacity. In theory the card reference design supports up to 224 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. There are obviously some very unhappy people out there about this situation, but much of this could have been avoided if NVIDIA had disclosed the exact nature of the GTX 970 configuration.